Welcome back to another installment of What the D-Pad, the weekly gaming podcast on Twitch.tv/TYFOfficial on every Wednesday or Thursday where we play a trending or topical game and discuss current news that I found on Twitter or Google News.
This week has some deep cuts, most recently including the potential risk of Bioware, the creators of Mass Effect and Knights of the Old Republic, being shut down if all goes wrong with the development of EA Loot-Shooter, Anthem. Plus, the GPU gold rush runs even more dry, Intel processors start to suck even more, Steam done goofed again with bad publishing and one of the heads on Metal Gear Survive claims the game is… not a Metal Gear game?
Meanwhile, Evan plays Iconoclasts, an adorable indie game that’s been ten years in the making!
The podcast is available in video form on Twitch and YouTube, and also in audio form on iTunes, Google Play and Soundcloud. News links will be provided below.
Here’s your news:
Via Gamespot Sea of Thieves Beta Released for select xone and PC players. Beta didn’t work for some people for a minute, they patched it before it made a lot of news – Rare is on point?
PC World tested the effect on Meltdown and Spectre patches on older PCs and its not fun… sort of good news is that CPU heavy tasks on these models seem to show minimal effect, but sharp 12% drop in media creation usage and benchmark test usage in performance when tested on a 5th gen i5 dell XPS.
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The really bad part of this – SYSMark 2014 SE is used to test system responsiveness when opening programs… results after the patch: “Intel’s own tests on 8th-gen and 7th-gen laptops put the performance drop at 14 percent, while 6th-gen Skylake takes a hard 21-percent fall. Our tests put the 5th-gen Broadwell at 23 percent in the hole.”
Via HotHardware – Nvidia begs people who are selling second hand GPU to sell to gamers and not cryptominers. Extreme examples include Newegg sellers bulk selling Nvidia graphics card hardware “six GeForce GTX 1080 cards priced at $6,700. That’s a $3,700 premium over buying the cards at what NVIDIA markets them for an MSRP.”
Via Kotaku Let’s talk about Anthem – Bioware might be at risk.
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Anthem has been delayed into 2019, but not AFTER march of 2019.
Because of the lackluster sales and reception on Mass Effect Andromeda, Bioware has the fate of the company riding on Anthem.
The game is being required to run on Frostbite engine, developed by DICE for the Battlefield franchise.
The delay may be because of internal workings on the current climate of micro-transactions, due to the controversies resulting from SW Battlefront II, as Anthem is a loot-shooter game not unlike Destiny and Borderlands.
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God of War gets a story trailer and release date on 4/20 – Santa Monica Studios director says “this is my favorite release date ever.”
Duke Nukem Michael Bay Movie Starring John Cena. Nothing else to see here, move along.
The game’s producer, Yuji Korekado, commented on the issue in an interview with Official PlayStation Magazine UK.
He told the publication, “There will not be loot boxes, and there will not be Pay-to-Win types of microtransactions. There will be things like the accessories in Metal Gear Online, and Forward Operating Base in MGSV: The Phantom Pain.”
Korekado also commented on the early confusion regarding what Metal Gear Survive would actually be. “Fans and gamers in general seemed to take Metal Gear Survive to be a continuation of the Metal Gear series, so I regret that we caused that confusion.”
Castlevania netflix show is returning for 8 more episodes this summer – get hype?
Elton John announces his final tour … that will last for three years – Why? Because he’s Elton, effin, John, Son!!
Valve is bad, yo – automated publishing system that lets offensive material get through the cracks on steam is crudely called Gay World, and discovered by a twitch streamer, lighting a fire in the gaming community all over again about how poor Valve’s tactics are with Steam as a platform to publish games.
Via Polygon, GDC Developer Survey shows growing interest in Switch, commitment to loot boxes, and Travis is overwhelmed with joy. Why are they making these comments now? Because apparently analysts are only just informing studios and publishers that VR is not the killer app game changer they expected it to be.
Nintendo shutting down Miitomo in May: AKA MiitoNOOOOOOOO – be sad, as the Mii app that was the first Nintendo outing ever for mobile devices on iOS and Android will be ending support on May 9th. Good Guy Nintendo will also be preventing coin purchases starting tomorrow and will even be refunding unused coins in game after that.
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